Body-mounted cameras offer benefits, questions for police, residents

The use of body-mounted cameras to record interactions between police officers and residents has grown across the country in recent years, though it still remains relatively rare. Here are some of the main pros and cons behind use of the cameras:

Pros

» The cameras reduce use-of-force incidents and complaints about use of force by officers.

» They provide valuable evidence. From ensuring the accuracy of victim and witness statements to giving an investigator a second look at a crime scene, they can help officers do their jobs.

» The video plays well in court. In a study conducted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, prosecutors were asked to rate the value of video evidence. As many as 93 percent said convictions were more likely as were pre-trial plea deals when video evidence was available.

Cons

» The cameras are costly. They range from about $400 to nearly $2,000 per camera, and the cost of maintenance and data storage only add to that. To be admissible in court, though, video quality must be high, which can drive up costs.

» Legal questions surrounding privacy, both for officers and residents, are still being litigated. The uncertainties could open a police department to a costly lawsuit.

» The technology remains imperfect. The cameras won’t capture everything, and managing the data can be time-consuming and difficult.

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Use of force in Greeley

Anytime Greeley police officers use force of any kind against suspects, they’re required to report it to their supervisor, and the incidents are reviewed internally to determine whether all policies were followed correctly. Complaints made by residents about use of force also are investigated. So far this year, there have been 48 incidents of use of force by Greeley officers that were reviewed internally.

There also have been five cases of complaints about use of force, but three of those were the officer-involved shootings, which are investigated as part of the protocol surrounding shootings. None of the reviews or investigations have shown wrongdoing on the part of the officer. The investigation into the Aug. 13 shooting in north Greeley still is active, and the results are due out later this month.

By contrast, 63 officers have received commendations for their actions in assisting residents.

Source: Greeley Police spokesman Sgt. Joe Tymkowych

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Dashboard cameras

While many departments across the country use dashboard cameras, they’re not in use in Greeley or by the Weld County Sheriff’s Office.

Greeley Police Chief Jerry Garner said they have limited utility since most of an officer’s interactions with the public occurs outside of the car, and the cameras only record a limited scope of activities.

Steve Reams, a Weld County Sheriff’s Office bureau chief and the Republican nominee to succeed John Cooke as the next sheriff, said his office experimented with them and found them ineffective.

“With patrol cars, we had a lot of issues where the cameras and the monitors created obstructions,” he said. “It became more of a traffic concern for our guys driving than it was a beneficial piece to monitor their safety.”

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The scene that unfolded three years ago in the gritty suburb of Los Angeles was fraught with enough danger to put even the most veteran police officer on guard.

Rialto, Calif., police responded to a 911 call reporting a mentally disturbed man with a gun in a parked car. When officers responded and approached the vehicle, the man got out and a confrontation ensued. Officers shot the man.

About 50 yards away, a resident stood on a balcony and captured the shooting on a cell phone video camera. Later, it turned up online.

“This video goes viral on YouTube, and it says, ‘Officers shoot unarmed man,’ ” Capt. Randy De Ande said, recalling the incident in a phone interview recently from his office. “There we are, everything is captured on videotape.”

The resident, though, wasn’t the only one with a camera. Rialto officers had just begun wearing body-mounted cameras as part of a first-of-its-kind study. Those cameras showed clearly the man had pointed his gun — which wasn’t visible in the resident’s recording ­— at officers and left them with little choice.

In a case like that, or in the Aug. 13 shooting of a 21-year-old military veteran by Greeley police, the certainty provided by body-mounted cameras on police officers might seem like a dream. But the decision about whether to issue such cameras to officers is a complex one, full of legal uncertainties, technical troubles, budget-busting costs and questions about whether the cameras help or hurt the effectiveness of officers.

Greeley Police Chief Jerry Garner said he’s looked closely at the use of body cameras, but he’s not ready to start issuing them to officers just yet.

When his staff looked into it earlier this year, its research determined only about 17 percent of departments in the state use the cameras. That number mirrors the national trend. About one in six departments across the country deploy the cameras, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

“It’s a new enough technology, and there are still such unsettled questions for privacy, both the citizen’s privacy and the officer’s privacy, that we just want to see that in use for a while before we bring that potential liability on us,” Garner said.

The cameras that officers in Rialto use are about the size of a cigarette. They can be mounted on glasses or clipped to the lapel of a uniform, which is how most officers in the department use them.

The base unit, which is wired to the officer’s uniform, goes in a pocket. Officers are required by department policies to activate the cameras anytime they get out of their cars to interact with residents, though some exceptions are made for sensitive situations.

Because of the way the camera system works, it actually begins recording five seconds before the officer activates it. The officers wear them for their entire shift — the batteries last about 12½ hours — and the cameras record high-quality video, even at night, De Ande said.

The cameras cost about $1,200 apiece, plus a monthly fee for data storage.

Not all cameras are the same. Taser International Inc., which says it is the largest provider of body-mounted cameras to U.S. law enforcement agencies, offers a range of cameras that cost from $400 to $700 each.

De Ande said the department has continued to use the cameras after the one-year study, which was conducted along with Cambridge University. The Rialto department liked the cameras and now issues them to 70 officers, nearly the entire police force in the city of about 100,000 residents.

The ACLU, which usually looks with chagrin on the use of omnipresent cameras by government, has come out in favor of the use of body cameras, so long as officers are given limited control over when it is turned off.

This requirement, though, raises its own problems.

“That creates the issue of privacy, both for the officer and the citizen,” Garner said.

For example, should all the casual conversations an officer has with his or her car partner during a shift be recorded? What about when officers are on break? Or when they go to the bathroom?

For residents, there are other privacy worries.

“When we come into your home to take a police report, for example, you’re a victim or you’re a witness, now everything that’s in front of the scope of that camera is being recorded,” Garner said. “Do you want us coming into your house recording everything that’s in front of us?”

That’s a particularly difficult question when it involves certain types of crimes.

“If you’re a sex-crime victim, for example, do you want a video/audio recording made of you making this report?” Garner asked. “I would suggest most people would tell you no.”

The cameras also can make it hard for police officers to do their jobs in other ways. Steve Reams, a Weld County Sheriff’s Office bureau chief and the Republican nominee to succeed John Cooke as the next Weld sheriff, said his office experimented with body cameras recently and chose not to use them for a variety of reasons, including effectiveness.

“But there’s also a safety concern,” he said. “In a major incident, you’re jumping out of a car, you’ve got to worry about flicking on a camera. It’s just one more thing to deal with.”

Cost is a major concern, too.

“You get what you pay for,” Reams said. “If you try to do things on the cheap, then you get a camera that may not have great recording quality.”

Garner estimated his department would need $150,000 to equip his officers and said that’s a major reason he has so far chosen not to adopt the technology.

Lastly, the technology can be difficult to manage, and storing all the data the cameras create adds significantly to the cost.

The Evans Police Department briefly used the cameras before taking a hiatus.

“The software, on the backside, to manage it became so cumbersome that the guys just didn’t want to do it,” Evans Police Chief Rick Brandt said. “It took a long time to download. We went back to the drawing board and started researching other cameras.”

Still, Brandt found another vendor that offers a cloud-based data management solution. He plans to buy about 10 cameras at a cost of about $11,000, plus about $7,000 a year for data management. That will give each on-duty officer a camera.

“It provides accurate information,” he said. “It’s valuable in case investigations, capturing scenes, and crime scenes that will have some information.”

Perhaps most importantly, there’s little doubt the cameras reduce both use-of-force incidents by officers and complaints about use of force from residents. The Rialto study, in which cameras were randomly issued to half the officers on each shift, found that use of force complaints dropped about 88 percent and use of force incidents declined 60 percent, numbers that have essentially held for the past three years.

“What better way to have transparency than when your police department is wearing body-worn cameras?” De Ande said. “The statistics behind the body-worn cameras do show a significant decrease in officer complaints and use of force, but it also on a lot of occasions exonerates officers and the decisions they make out there in the field.”

Garner said he sees the camera’s ability to reduce the use of force as an unequivocal positive. And he said that’s one reason why the department may eventually adopt the technology. He drew the comparison to Tasers, which were once a controversial technology before becoming virtually standard equipment in departments across the country.

“We looked at Tasers for a number of years before we adopted them,” he said, noting they watched how Tasers worked for other departments. “We determined after watching that the benefits outweighed the risks.”

For now, though, the unsettled legal questions — and the potential for a lawsuit that come with them ­— have Garner waiting and watching.

“We’d like to allow somebody with deeper pockets than we have to plow that ground before we jump into it,” he said.